olpc – Guysoft's Webloghttps://guysoft.wordpress.com
42Thu, 22 Feb 2018 04:55:09 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngolpc – Guysoft's Webloghttps://guysoft.wordpress.com
Interview with me about the OLPC Pilot in Israelhttps://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/olpc-crictor/
https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/olpc-crictor/#commentsTue, 01 Sep 2009 09:14:30 +0000http://guysoft.wordpress.com/?p=387Crictor, the “technology news, for technology people” initiative I actually help found, interviewed me about the OLPC pilot in Israel, during the Israeli FOSS convention called August Penguin. Also, in the convention Netzach gave a talk about the pilot we did, and the new program with open source and eeePCs.

Hey all,
This past week I managed to do something quite interesting. I got sugar, running on my Nokia N810, compiled for armel.

The trick that made it work was thanks to easy Debian chroot, that got me access to installing sugar without a few good hours of compilation for arm (and I did that before).

Touchscreen is cool!

The first thing that I found pretty neat was running sugar on a touchscreen device. It really felt better, since most people that I let play with my XO and flip its screen 180 degrees naturally try touching the screen, expecting it had a touchscreen. Sugar was actually quite good with it on the Nokia.

Any hardware – Any use

It is refreshing to see Sugar running on a different system, let alone a difference architecture (armel). Sugar seems to be attributed to OLPC and its unique hardware. I guess this comes to show that to in order to get sugar really to reach its full potential, we should take in to account it can run on anything: Why not old hardware? Why not smartphones? OLPC uses the XO, but everyone else can use anything else really.

This also is connected to things going on in our pilot in OLPC Israel. I won’t get in to it in this post, because Netzach and I are going to write a report about it regarding a pilot we are doing with 9 Bedouin kids in the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center.

More about the hardware – How to get Sugar in your pocket

If you are wondering if this actually worked fully on the Nokia (unlike people who claim Android worked there, and it’s just the x86 emulator). Well, it did pretty much work. However it was slow, and you wont get the browser working on it with 128MB ram. However I did get avahi-daemon working (remember to turn it on). Then I got in to the Chat system, and I could share things, etc. You might need to enlarge the easy chroot iso image, so you have space to install sugar. I also guess that if someone installs it on Mer (an Ubuntu-based distro for the Nokia), it might even work faster.

Another problem is that the Nokia keyboard has no F1-F12 keys. They are essential in sugar. So I had to plug in an external USB keyboard for that. It could be fixed with an Xmodmap script.

Thats all for now more pictures below.

Watching the network view

Sugar on the Nokia talking to an XO

Nokia N810 and XO together

]]>https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/nokia-n810-running-olpc-sugar/feed/11guysoftSugar running on the Nokia N810Watching the network viewSugar on the Nokia talking to an XONokia N810 and XO togetherOLPC Israel’s New Debian Based System for Pilothttps://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/olpc_israel_debian_os/
https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/olpc_israel_debian_os/#commentsSat, 07 Feb 2009 11:53:53 +0000http://guysoft.wordpress.com/?p=206

OLPC Israel Debian Desktop View

Hey All,

I am Happy to update we have now a working prototype OS for the OLPC pilot here in Israel.

As explained in my last post, we have only B2/B1 laptops that are not compatible with the current sugar version. Because of this we had to develop our own OS that we will put on SD cards and in to the laptops (in the full project we want to use sugar, we did this for the B2s only really).

This system works well also with the normal OLPC units. And I’d be glad if anyone would like to use it copy, and modify.

The system is based off Debian and runs on XFCE. The B2 laptops work with only 128 RAM so we really reduced the memory usage. The kernel on the system is from build 711, which is the last to work with the B2. Still, it works fine on any OLPC. I hope we will have Kernel Headers for the release someone in the future.
I’d also like to take the opportunity for give a huge thanks to Ram-on Agmon who really got the system up and running.

If you are running a modern OLPC system you will also have to include your developer key in the right place.

One last unrelated thing (before pictures of the OS): There are updates on the web that OLPC has stopped the “give many program”, if anyone is worried about that effecting our pilot then i can assure you I talked to OLPC and it is related only to people that want to buy laptops regardless to intent and where they are in the world. Not to mention we are working as volunteers with a university to get this project to people who need it.

Hope to update soon, however I might not because I have a big test in physics the next week, and the ones after.

Dima (ITU alumnai), Netzach (head of Ilan Ramon Center) and I had a meeting with Peres Center for Peace. To our great surprise, the center had 24 B2 laptops, which were laying there for more than a year without any use (if you are yelling “but why?!” then the quick answer is that none had the technical ability to get them truly working).

So to sum up: the pilot can start! .. but wait, there is a catch.

The goal of the pilot the moment is not exactly what you might think.

The B2 machines are really old, Dan from OLPC, who just came back from Ethiopia, told me that they have B2 laptops in storage, where they belong. These are not modern OLPCs. And OLPC don’t support them anymore.

So our goal is not really to show that these computers are going to be the main learning tool for children, they are going to be mostly a tool for playing with code. OLPC Israel is not getting of the ground, because the main opposition says that its just a toy, not a “real computer” they say “its good for kids in Africa, but here its an insult to people that want what their friends have”. And with that, no funding could be received, no research is done, and the laptops just lay there.

Our pilot does see the laptops as educational toys for the moment. And we are going to try and show that in our environment they can aid children, giving them 24/7 access time to their machine that they can code on but not as a laptop (even if it would be shell only!).

This is the current status. I wish we could have gotten, right now new OLPCs, but with the current funding problem this is what we have. And once we have a report of how kids relate to the laptop, the adults might have the confidence to buy new OLPCs, and the snowball effect might go from there.

We need technical help

Luckily the B2 laptops can load the new operating system of OLPC, but one major problem remains – the graphics adapter won’t load (the new OLPC has a diffrent one). So what we need now is help compiling the old driver whose support has been dropped, on the new system. If you can help out, call me at 050-8580942, and I might even lend you a B2 unit to test this out. Because it is a big problem at the moment.

The plan

The Ilan Ramon Center already has an ongoing project for mathematical thinking and programing in the Be’er Sheva area (aka the Negev desert), where they mostly help poor families, and also Bedouin. This is a perfect place to help with OLPCs (some Bedouin even live in tents!). There is a lot to do to help. This past week I had to help the people in the Center get a C and Java IDE to work on the green laptop.

Roadmap

At the moment we need to adapt the laptops to suit the needs of the Ilan Ramon Center project. This means translating Sugar to Hebrew, here we really could use help from the community. We also need to make the preparations so the laptops won’t get stuck at customs. Also we need to prepare a software image to load in to the laptops once they get here.

Also (sadly) we wont be able to print Hebrew keyboards (OLPC works by the ten of thousands, ‘ too much). So we would have to figure out a way with stickers, and design a layout for the small keyboard.

We Need Translators!

At the moment we have about 3000 strings to translate for the graphical interface. I’ll be glad to recruit any volunteer that can translate and help our Israeli OLPC project, and OLPC as a whole.

Also, I’d like to get anyone that wants to help in the loop and update you about what’s going on, whether it’s code, or anything else you might want to do.

There were a few people before that contributed code from Israel, but i am not sure who they were (who on earth translated scracth?!).

(You can contact me at guysoft _at_ gmail.com)

I hope to update whenever I can, the university takes up all my time now.

What Next?

There are two major things I want to do next.

The first one is to script all the creation process, so we should have a working repository that would hold Debian packages of the newest sugar build. Also, it would be nice if anyone could help me get the package buildable in fedora, that is what the OLPC develoepers use, and i want this to be accessible to them as possible.

However this is more maintenance.

What I REALLY would like to get going is the ability of a computer lab, with these livecds working, to be able to communicate to a class that runs on OLPCs. This could be a really kick to this little project, and might take it to the classrooms.

This is what I truly want from this project, kids across the world, communicating, using a common platform.

]]>https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/sugar-jhbuild-live/feed/5guysoftsugar-live2Day Five – Innovation Forum, OLPC class, Electionshttps://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day5/
https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day5/#commentsSat, 11 Oct 2008 23:20:21 +0000http://guysoft.wordpress.com/?p=86Hey all,
Today was back full of work. It started with an interesting panel, continued with of elections and ended in a mall.

The first thing I noticed was that Rohan Samarajiva, who was in
yesterdays panel, was in this panel too. However this time I understood his talk. It was interesting. He spoke of the fact that Asia can’t adopt the business models that were developed in the west, basically because they were assuming that the
infrastructure for ICT exists already and that people can invest a large
portion of their budget in ICT.
Moreover, there is an interesting phenomena where the laws of supply and demand are applied. In the western world model the price reaches an equilibrium at a relatively high price. However, if you drastically cut the price so the worker force can afford the services (those who make only dollars a day), the market grows by the millions and the price becomes profitable again.
Another nice story told in the forum was told by H.Lewis which quoted goes something like this: “There has been nearly no research done on the social aspect of ICT. Take the phone system for instance, its among the oldest ICT technology we have, but we still have no idea why people call one another. I’ll give you an example: a husband calling his wife on the way home from work to ask if the is no milk in the fridge. If this were an important issue he could have checked it in the morning or once he gets home. Thus saving on this ‘unnecessary call’. The technology people would solve this right away by saying that there should be a link between the fridge and the husband’s cellphone and will also design a smart fridge. However, you can all understand that this wasn’t the true reason of this call.” This was one of many criticisms on the fact that the industry isn’t doing long term radical research that won’t bear fruit in the first quarter, specifically in the social aspects of ICT.
I left the panel in the middle this time, although I really wanted to stay, it was fascinating! But the room was freezing and my throat was hurting the past two days. We started this joke here, that we always sit a the front rows and then slowly migrate backwards to a more tropical climate. Actually when I migrated all the way out I came across a surreal act – the Thai crew were dressed in Mexican outfits and there were plastic cacti everywhere. Apparently the coffee break food’s theme was Mexico. It seems I migrated too far south.

After the break the youth members split, and a class about using the OLPC was opened. Anthony Wong, who is the director of OLPC Asia and China (Keller’s parallel in Asia. BTW I successfully seem to catch him for talks every day so far). I saw the lecture would be only the basics so I volunteered beforehand to be an assistant in the session. So as usual, I was running around helping people with problems in the session. I better stress to the readers that if they think they know how the OLPC would work because its Linux based, they are mistaken. The laptop’s system has all the Linux tools, but on top of it there is an interface there is a completely different called sugar. There is no folder structure. Only after 3 days, I figured out how to save on a usb stick in the GUI. During the session Wong showed different children applications. It troubled me since the youth forum members kept asking me about other things – like saving files and editing text and so on. At the end of the session I told him that and that most of them didn’t feel they can’t do anything with the computer. He however replied that the computer is not for them, it is there so they can show it to their governments with the kids applications. I still disagreed, and that they still need to feel its a fully capable computer in order to convince anyone to invest in it. I also had a conversation with the head of W3C Israel over skype at the end of the day, who agreed with Wong. He said that it needs to get ministers to say “wow”, I do see that he has a point, but I think it won’t work if the youth members won’t know its a computer, and not just a toy.

After the Session Walda Roseman (aka “the mother of the youth forum”) announced that we shall now vote for the two youth forum members that would represent the youth forum’s closing declaration, in front of the ITU tomorrow. Our task was to elect a male and female representative for this task. I personally did not plan on running. But as I entered the room I started to see that there is a large group that wants me to participate. According to the election laws one can nominate anyone including him or herself. So a few minutes later I found myself in a row with the rest of the opponents explaining why I could contribute and represent the forum. However at the end I was not elected. Actually I think it was a good thing, I had so many other things to do that I couldn’t find time to sleep anyway. In a way I maybe should not have run in the end and had support the ones who were elected (they were the ones I voted for). Sill I was told by the voters I came second.

After the elections we were taken to a big mall. I bought a few electronic things and was actually given a gift from one of the chaperones, Jazz music by the kind of Thailand, with notes! We ate and went back to the hotel.

]]>https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day5/feed/2guysoftThe Innovation PanelOLPC training sessionDay Three – Campaign against Censorship in Israel, Keller in a Pub, Princess Siam and I.https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day3/
https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day3/#commentsSat, 11 Oct 2008 23:15:34 +0000http://guysoft.wordpress.com/?p=62Today a few important things happened, I am giving a table of contents so you can skip to what interests you.

In the morning we woke up even earlier than the day before, at 05:30, because the staff did not want us to e late to the opening ceremony that was starring the princess of Thailand. I don’t have much to tell apart from the fact that is was pretty cool to be in such a royal event. However we got stuck at the youth forum lounge because the princess decided to stay for lunch at the pavilion.

As we were stuck at the lounge I noticed the group form Palestine. Up till then, I did not get the chance to exchange any words with them, so I did. I would like to stress that there is no hostility between any of us. On the contrary, we all want to make new friends. I talked to Muhammad who is from Ramallah, and we put up the idea of helping connectivity in Ramallah in combine with joint classrooms between Israel and Palestine. We said this should continue after the conference. I want to stress this – I truly believe that this is the way to end our ongoing conflict would be to talk and form human connections. It might sound like a cliche, but I do think we need to solve this from bottom to top as well as from top to bottom.

Once of the problems I wanted to bring up during my visit was the censorship law that is in stages to be passed in the Israeli government that will, in effect, give the ministry of communication the way to block sites from the public. At the coffee break I talked with Howard Williams who was a part of the policy and regulation forum. Howard called a group with the heads of the youth forum (I am not sure who was who exactly, apart from Walda). The problem is that the ITU can’t tell the governments what to do, and it tries to avoid the censorship problems because countries like China, Iran and others are part of it. So what I said is that we could try and tackle the problem where it lies. The law that is being passed in Israel, is cleverly disguised as a law to stop paedophiles and porn sites (what politician would vote against such a law?). The politicians have no idea what they are approving! In the news site I am part of, we tried to contact the members of parliament that voted for the law, but only got refusals to comment (this includes the political party that proposed the law!).

This has led us to the following idea: What we should do is write to a news paper aboard, that would be read by the members of parliament (something on the scale of &quot;The Economist&quot;), the article would show the absurd steps taken by the Israeli government (this law is non-democratic, this is no secret), and hope this kind of criticism will reach the minds of the voters. I also find it as my duty to bring this subject to the youth forum table, as reluctant as lot of people are to talk about it.

After the forum we were taken to an opening ceremony that was pretty impressive, we were asked to come there with our formal attire (aka the traditional clothing of our country). Unfortunately there is no formal attire in Israel, so I just wore smart clothes. There seemed to be a lot of VIP everywhere. Then suddenly all the friends of the youth forum started dancing on the stage, which was pretty exiting (you need to picture about 100 people from 50 countries dancing together in their traditional clothing).

After the party, I started talking to Matt Keller, he seemed to be the main presenter for OLPC in the conference. He invited Rotem, Davor (the representative of Australia) and myself to a pub! We spoke on the way about practically everything, from the fact the UN is not bold enough on things, to politics in Israel, he even said he is arriving to our area in September (to Lebanon). There is a sentence he said that I would like to quote here: “The UN withholds saying that a laptop per child in country X is going to contribute the country. Since it might damage the traditional way of life. If the question was – do you think your county would benefit from electricity, what would you think the answer would be?!”. I think this give the basic insight of OLPC, that people tend to miss. ICT should be just like the public health service, electricity and anything that is provided to citizens.

Its more or less 04:26 now, so I must go to sleep now. Here are the chosen pictures of the day.

Keller from OLPC and I at the party

Everyone in their formal attire

]]>https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day3/feed/4guysoftKeller from OLPC and I at the partyEveryone in their formal attireDay Two – I have an OLPC + storieshttps://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day2/
https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day2/#commentsSat, 11 Oct 2008 23:13:52 +0000http://guysoft.wordpress.com/?p=49Hey,

Yesterday at night my room-mate arrived. He is from a country called Kiribati. Its a small county in the Pacific, I am still finding it hard to pronounce his name. I hope to post when I get it .

Today was pretty exhausting. We woke up at 06:00 and now the time is 00:09.

After breakfast we went to the Impact Hall, which is the central place for the conference that will start tomorrow. At the place there was an opening forum followed by a panel on technology and innovation.

During the day we all got an OLPC that was donated by the OLPC foundation! (yes, one laptop per youth fellow!). It seems that the foundation is merging in to the ITU, and OLPC donated 100 laptops to us.

Sadly we have connection problems in the area (HTTP authentication in the ITU seems like an oxymoron). However I hope this is the first step for me in entering the project – I can now develop of it!

Back to the daily routine – it seems all along the day the ITU was trying to push young people to be a part of it. Remember this organisation is really old, its prior to the UN and came up when the telegraph did. Now they need young new people to carry it on (after all this is good for everyone). There was a lot of emphasis on the fact that we have the power to change the lives of many and we are now a part of a network of people that can help us make this happen. This means that I can now channel requests to our county directly to the ITU people (good again because our country seems to have pretty weak connections to this wonderful union). They say we are now called Alumni (BTW it seems a single one is an alumnus), and that there are thousands that went thought this program, all and all it was pretty exiting.

At lunch I talk to Raza Jafari, the chairman of the board of directors of the ITU. We sat and talked about many things, I enjoyed the casual atmosphere. I asked him about the censorship law that is trying to be passed in Israel and if there is anything the ITU can do. He confirmed my thought that the ITU can’t do anything since its a decision made by the government, however he did seem happy to see that some people in the county understand the hazard that will be caused by such a law and know it should be stoped. After that I asked him about the problem we face in Israel regarding the non-standard webpages in important places like the government and banks, this is a W3C related problem, still, I wondered if there is any help the ITU can give. He did agree its a worldwide problem, but he seemed to be optimistic that slowly the big organisations will understand the benefit and standardize themselves. Finally I asked him about some idea I heard once in a lecture on TED, about connecting network repeaters to cars to form a huge mesh network, turning any highway to a huge internet pipeline. To my surprise he said there is some project in process, and told me to remember this again in the year 2012 (so write that one down).

Following this there was a technology and innovation (that word IBM has a patent on), there was a hot debate about countries like Indonesia and Australia. Where the service providers don’t have any interest to connect remote places, but are all focusing on the cities only. The outcome is monopolies of providers in remote areas, or worse – disconnectivity. It seems like the general solution was “use the right technology for the problem” (like WIFI meshes or satellite in those areas).

After the forum, I spoke to one of its participants Araon Chippendale from Australia, he is a radio astronomer in the microwave spectrum, his superior is the one who invented the wifi chip and sold it to Cisco. We went on to talk about astronomy and he briefly mentioned that his thesis is about galaxy formation (that stuff interests me).

After this I talked to Dan Duzion from the Philippines, he is working on a project to recycle and set up old computers for schools with new Linux-based software. I am happy to catch someone like that here because I want to connect him to an Israeli team that is doing just that. Everyone can benefit from everyone else’s experience.

At the end of the day we went to a show for tourists with semi-traditional dancing. It was specular visually, but not much connected to the ancient tradition. None the less it was fun.

Here are pictures of the day:

I am on the left, with a small group at the area of the conference. The amount of countries is huge. I did not come to Bangkok, I came to the whole world

Matt Keller with Siaeli Moshi and an OLPC

]]>https://guysoft.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/itu2008day2/feed/2guysoftI am on the left, with a small group at the area of the conference. The amount of countries is huge. I did not come to Bangkok, I came to the whole worldMatt Keller with Siaeli Moshi and an OLPC